Πέμπτη, 2 Ιουνίου 2016

AP ImagesTurkey's
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses a rally marking the 563rd
anniversary of the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul on Sunday, May 29, 2016.

In
the latest round of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's milking of the EU-Turkey
refugee deal, the Turkish President has now threatened Berlin over the
Bundestag's motion to declare the 1915 killing of up to 1.5 million
Armenians by Ottoman Turks a "genocide."

Erdogan said the vote would damage relations between the
two countries. The fear is that Turkey might abandon the already shaky
EU-Turkey deal, in which the EU has agreed to pay Turkey €6 billion
(about $6.7 billion), and in return Turkey keeps hundreds of thousands
of refugees from the Middle East out of Europe.

German lawmakers are expected to approve the resolution to call the
killings a genocide on Thursday. The denomination is one that Turkey
strongly rejects.The massacre of up to 1.5 million Armenians, the vast majority of
whom were Christian, by the Ottoman Turks is widely recognized as a
genocide by historians throughout the world. The mass killings started
on April 24, 1915, when about 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders were rounded up in Constantinople by authorities, most of whom were then deported and murdered.To those who see the killings as a genocide, this is when the
systematic killing of all Armenians in Turkey began under the rule of
the Ottoman Turks. The origin of the enmity between the Turks and the
Armenians is long and complicated. Basically, the Ottoman Empire went
into decline at the beginning of the 20th century and lost 85% of its
territory by about 1912. A flood of Muslim refugees from the lost Balkan
territories entered Turkey, and that provoked an ultranationalist
backlash against the Armenians who lived there.The Ottoman government saw the situation as an ongoing war, in which
the Armenians were sympathetic to the Russian enemy who had ejected
Muslims from the Caucasus. In fact, many Armenians fought alongside the
Russians in the Caucasus during World War I. The Armenians were regarded
as an internal security threat. Rouben Paul Adalian, an American
historian, and director of the Armenian National Institute wrote in the Encyclopedia of Genocide:

In April 1915 the Ottoman government
embarked upon the systematic decimation of its civilian Armenian
population. The persecutions continued with varying intensity until 1923
when the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist and was replaced by the
Republic of Turkey. The Armenian population of the Ottoman state was
reported at about two million in 1915. An estimated one million had perished by 1918, while hundreds of thousands had become homeless and stateless refugees. By 1923 virtually the entire Armenian population of Anatolian Turkey had disappeared.

To the Armenians, having the mass-scale killing of their ancestors
recognized as a genocide is very important and April 24, known as "Red
Sunday," is commemorated every year by Armenians around the world.Wikimedia/Cflm001The
dark green countries officially recognize the events as genocide. In
light green countries certain political parties, provinces or
municipalities have recognized the events as genocide, independently
from the government as a whole.Turkey, however, refuses to recognise the mass killings as a
genocide, saying that it was during a time of war and that the Armenian
people presented a threat the Ottoman Turks because most of the
Armenians had sided with Russia during World War I when the Ottoman
Empire was an ally of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Turkey's longstanding position is that that the reported number of
people killed is exaggerated; there was no organized campaign to wipe
out the Armenians; and that there is no evidence of such orders from the
Ottoman authorities of the day.Adalian concludes that Turkey succeeded in its plan:

Triumphant in its total
annihilation of the Armenians and relieved of any obligations to the
victims and survivors, the Turkish Republic adopted a policy of
dismissing the charge of genocide and denying that the deportations and
atrocities had constituted part of a deliberate plan to exterminate the
Armenians. When the Red Army sovietized what remained of Russian Armenia
in 1920, the Armenians had been compressed into an area amounting to no
more than ten percent of the territories of their historic homeland.

Death threats

Last year, 100 years after the start of the massacre, a slew of
European nations passed motions that officially recognized the killing
of the Armenians as a genocide.Germany, where the issue is more sensitive than in other nations due
to the high number of Turks living there, passed a first reading in
April 2015 but the second and third readings needed to make it official
have been pushed back ever since. According to German magazine Der Spiegel,
the government wanted to avoid "needlessly provoking" Ankara when their
aid is so desperately needed to tackle the refugee crisis.Wikimedia CommonsTurkish soldiers march Armenian civilians to the desert.The United Kingdom and the United States do not officially recognise the massacre as a genocide.Erdogan lashed out at those who he said were trying to "deceive" Germany over the 1915 massacres, and said, according to Reuters,
that "If Germany is to be deceived by this, then bilateral diplomatic,
economic, trade, political, and military ties — we are both NATO
countries — will be damaged."German politicians and journalists covering the event have since then received threats.Journalists who use the word "genocide" in their reporting have reported receiving emails that included death threats. Der Spiegel reports
that one particular email to a journalist said, "Your end will be the
same as Hrant Dink's." Dink was an Armenian-Turkish journalist who was
murdered in Istanbul in 2007 by a far-right Turkish youth.More than 500 Turkish organisations have also put together a text
they are urging Turks living in Germany to send to politicians. They
write that over 90% of the Turkish population does not accept that the
massacres amount to genocide and that passing the readings would be
"poison for the peaceful coexistence between Germans and Turks in this
country, but also in Turkey," according to Der Spiegel.Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan urged German lawmakers to not bow to Turkish pressure in an interview with German newspaper Bild.
"I am sure: the politicians in the Bundestag see it the same way and
will not allow themselves to be intimidated," he said, "If one makes
compromises for short-term political interests, then one ends up doing
so again and again. And that is bad for Germany, that is bad for Europe
and the world."AP ImagesGerman
Chancellor Angela Merkel, left, talks to Turkey's President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan during a roundtable meeting on "Political Leadership to
Prevent and End Conflicts" at the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul,
Monday, May 23, 2016.The Greens, who
have pushed for the resolution, have done so at a very bad time for
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is struggling to keep the EU-Turkey
deal afloat. The task was made significantly harder since the dismissal
last week of her staunchest ally in Turkey, Prime Minister Davotuglo.Cem Oezdemir, a leader of the Green Party who has Turkish roots, told Reuters:
"It wasn't our goal to hold this vote now, but the timing is not that
important. The Bundestag is doing this because this is also a part of
German history. The Ottoman and German empires were essentially brothers
in arms."The resolution also aims to address the role of Germany during the
killings but starts by condemned the massacre as genocide: "The fate of
the Armenians is exemplary in the history of mass exterminations, ethnic
cleansing, deportations and yes, genocide, which marked the 20th
century in such a terrible way."Merkel, who last month was heavily criticized after she authorized
the prosecution of a German comedian who had insulted Erdogan, is
expected to vote for the resolution, gambling on the deal that is
keeping a potential 3 million refugees living in Turkey out of Europe.